Reporting of business intelligence (BI) is the process of accessing, formatting, and delivering stored, collected and processed data. Reporting helps users understand the performance of a business and leads to immediate action on the most recent information. It creates a common context for decision-making.
Reporting provides high-performance engines to merge predefined report templates with large volumes of data to produce, publish and distribute reports to a wide audience of information consumers. Key reporting features for reporting include advanced formatting, multi-pass calculations, bursting, table of contents navigation, on-demand paging, report element security and output to multiple formats (for example, portable document format (PDF), hypertext markup language (HTML), and spreadsheet applications).
When a report is generated, it is common to retrieve the data from different databases, aggregate them and display the data in a report. It is also common to set a format style to the data to be presented in a report. For example, a cell in a spreadsheet may be specified to a particular format, such as string, number, etc. A user may modify format settings of a cell individually or in a grouping such as a column or row. However, modifying the format of a footer or header of a page does not modify cells. Similarly, modifying the data format of one or more cells does not modify a header or footer of a page or display of a report.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved system and method of format specification in a report.